Drawing upon decades of experience, RAND provides research services, systematic analysis, and innovative thinking to a global clientele that includes government agencies, foundations, and private-sector firms.

The Pardee RAND Graduate School (PRGS.edu) is the largest public policy Ph.D. program in the nation and the only program based at an independent public policy research organization—the RAND Corporation.

Download eBook for Free

Policymakers — state and federal, legislative and judicial — have expressed their interest in updating the laws regarding electronic surveillance. This interest is motivated by several recent trends. First, law enforcement surveillance has traditionally been limited as much by practical considerations, including the costs and technical difficulty of obtaining evidence, as legal ones. However, technological innovations have undermined these traditional practical protections, raising questions about the adequacy of the legal protections that remain. Second, law enforcement agencies are no longer the only entities collecting information about individuals. A wide variety of commercial entities now collect information about their customers, which law enforcement can access with only minimal legal protections. However, attempts to update electronic surveillance laws are made more difficult by the fact that very little is currently known about how law enforcement officers use electronic surveillance and commercial information requests. This dissertation presents the results of three studies that investigate how law enforcement uses electronic surveillance.

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Introduction

Chapter Two

Does Rejection of the Third Party Doctrine Change Use of Electronic Surveillance? Evidence from the Wiretap Reports

Chapter Three

Reconsidering Law Enforcement Use of Technological Search and Seizure: Dollars and Sense

Chapter Four

The Gilded Age of Electronic Surveillance

Chapter Five

Conclusion

Appendix A

Bibliography, Does Rejection of the Third Party Doctrine Change Use of Electronic Surveillance?

Appendix B

Description of State Supreme Court Cases Affirming or Rejecting the Third-Party Doctrine

Appendix C

Additional Comparison of Intercept Trends

Appendix D

Results of Sensitivity Analyses

Appendix E

References, Reconsidering Law Enforcement Use of Technological Search and Seizure

Appendix F

Full List of Considerations for Using Electronic Surveillance and Commercial Requests

Research conducted by

This document was submitted as a dissertation in August 2016 in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the doctoral degree in public policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. The faculty committee that supervised and approved the dissertation consisted of Edward Balkovich (Chair), James Anderson, and Sasha Romanosky.

This report is part of the RAND Corporation dissertation series. Pardee RAND dissertations are produced by graduate fellows of the Pardee RAND Graduate School, the world's leading producer of Ph.D.'s in policy analysis. The dissertations are supervised, reviewed, and approved by a Pardee RAND faculty committee overseeing each dissertation.

Permission is given to duplicate this electronic document for personal use only, as long as it is unaltered and complete. Copies may not be duplicated for commercial purposes. Unauthorized posting of RAND PDFs to a non-RAND Web site is prohibited. RAND PDFs are protected under copyright law. For information on reprint and linking permissions, please visit the RAND Permissions page.

The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.

Boustead, Anne E., Police, Process, and Privacy: Three Essays on the Third Party Doctrine, Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, RGSD-384, 2016. As of March 12, 2019: https://www.rand.org/pubs/rgs_dissertations/RGSD384.html

The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest.